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Love story ends with sick woman taking own life

Immobilized by multiple sclerosis, Elizabeth MacDonald went to Zurich’s Dignitas clinic with her Anglican priest husband, Eric, to end her life.

Elizabeth MacDonald, shown with her husband, Eric, decided to take her own life rather than die a horrible death from multiple sclerosis. She died at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 8, 2007.

The woman he was referring to had dined with MacDonald at the same table the previous evening.

It was his wife, Elizabeth.

“She’s not here,” Eric replied.

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It was the only response he could muster.

Elizabeth was dead.

He’d watched her die only hours earlier in a controversial Swiss clinic where suicides are legally carried out under medical supervision.

“I was numb,” the retired Anglican priest, now 70, recalls one recent afternoon as he retells the story surrounded by photos of the woman he says gave meaning to his life over their 17 years of marriage — a meaning that his faith never could.

“I couldn’t really feel my body. Although I could walk and talk and sit down and do all the usual things, my body felt as though it were not really there.”

Together, Eric and Elizabeth had travelled from their home in Windsor, N.S. that summer to fulfill her final wish — to be set free from the multiple sclerosis slowly eating away at her body.

The events that led them there ultimately triggered Eric’s disaffection with the faith he’d practised and preached all of his life.

And it left him — and many of his supporters — with anger over Canadian laws that criminalize assisted death and force those with terminal illnesses to seek extraordinary means of escaping intractable pain.

“The laws in Canada are unjust,” says Eric. “It forced someone like Elizabeth to make a decision about her life or death before she would have been forced to make it.”

No one knew when she might grow too ill to administer a drug to take her own life.

And she decided she couldn’t take any chances.

“If she’d known from the early days that (a planned death) would have been an option for her in Canada, I think she would have lived three or four years longer than she did. We were robbed of those years.”

The reminders of the years they did share together are everywhere.

A large photograph of Elizabeth smiling in a field of sunflowers is positioned just above his head as he speaks.

At the foot of the fireplace sits a ship’s wheel they discovered on the shore of Grand Manan Island on their first trip together.

Just above, Elizabeth’s engagement and wedding rings rest together, the lasting symbols of their unlikely union.

She was the daughter of a parishioner and had joined her sister in a confirmation class he was teaching.

She was 15 years old — 27 years his junior.

Many years later, she would tell him she fell in love with him that day.

In the intervening years, Elizabeth would babysit for the MacDonalds from time to time or just drop by the house for visits.

Gradually, he saw something unique in her.

Despite the obvious impediments, he came to the inescapable understanding that they were kindred spirits.

In a small town, people know when a marriage is in trouble.

Elizabeth “could see it,” he says. “Eventually, it became clear that she was interested in me and I was interested in her.”

She told him she wouldn’t go away to university for fear it would steal any chance of them being together.

Eric and his wife separated in 1988.

His wife moved to another town.

Elizabeth helped him care for his two children, who remained with him.

On a winter evening he was driving her home in a winter snowstorm.

The car came to a sharp yield in the road that required him to lean over toward her side for a better view of oncoming traffic.

The moment merged into their first kiss.

“It just sort of happened,” he remembers. “We folded into each other. It was remarkable. It was the first time she ever used my name. Until then, I was Father MacDonald.”

In a series of poems Eric composed shortly after his wife’s death, he wrote:

“I yielded then/a road sign still precious in my memory of you . . . I yielded to the gravity/of your expectant hoping, wondering . . . Your first kiss . . . A moment to seal all moments/until all our moments should be sealed and gone.”

The honeymoon never really ended.

The son of a United Church minister, a lifelong man of faith trained in spiritual ministry, he felt for the first time that his life had purpose and direction.

The concepts he’d read and spoken so many times before moved from intellectual concepts to feelings.

“Elizabeth was the person who transformed my life from something worthless to something with value. I guess that’s what I was seeking in the church, but never found.”

The first hint of what was to come revealed itself on a September Sunday morning in 1998 when Elizabeth woke up feeling the top left quadrant of her face had gone numb.

Doctors were confounded at first.

The official diagnosis came a few months later: progressive multiple sclerosis.

Elizabeth knew two parishioners had been paralyzed and eventually suffered painful deaths from the disease.

She knew what lay ahead.

“She said, ‘Look, you have to know that at some point I’m not going to be here,’ ” she told Eric. “ ‘I don’t want to be trapped in my body. I’m not going to tell you when I’m going to go, but one day you’ll come home and I won’t be here.’ ”

Her deterioration was relentless.

By 2002, she couldn’t get out of a car. She fell down and was hospitalized.

Soon, she couldn’t walk without assistance.

Nurses had to come to the house to “toilet” her.

She was eventually bound to a wheelchair.

“It was just awful watching it,” Eric recalls. “She couldn’t look at pictures of herself when she could walk. It reminded her of what she had lost.”

She started talking regularly about ending her life.

“I kept saying, ‘Hold on for a bit longer.’”

He wasn’t ready.

“You took a broken man and made him whole/You loved him back from a lifetime of self-doubt and empty dreams/You gave him love without question,/loyalty without stint,/encouragement without restraint.”

Elizabeth, while raised Anglican, was not spiritual. She didn’t believe in God.

She didn’t hold out hope of an afterlife. She wanted nothingness.

He came to believe as she did.

Asked if he prayed for her during her decline, his response is decisive: “No, never.”

His professional duties preaching the church’s message were strained. Candid admissions about his failing faith pronounced from the pulpit each Sunday grew increasingly uncomfortable.

“I told people what I thought about Christian beliefs. I found it difficult to say anything positive about Jesus or the reliability of the scriptures, and I said so.”

On the morning of their 16th anniversary, he left her a note and flowers on his way out.

The note explained that it would be cruel of him to hold on to her too tightly and that she had his permission to go when she chose to go.

She framed the note and placed it by her desk, where it remained.

“I think it was the permission she was waiting for,” he says.

On September 6, 2006 — the anniversary of Elizabeth’s first symptom — Eric walked into his wife’s home office to find her slumped unconscious at the computer.

She’d attempted to take her own life with a morphine overdose.

He didn’t call 911. She wouldn’t have wanted it.

He moved her to the bed and lay there with her for the next 36 hours until she eventually awoke.

“She was quite upset,” he says. “She tried to die alone and she had to do it all over again.”

That’s when she did some research and discovered the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

The night she received provisional acceptance from Dignitas was the first night she’d slept in a long time, he recalls.

“The sense of relief was visible. From that point on, she felt like her future was known and secure.”

She chose June 8, 2007, at 11 a.m. as her time of death.

“She knew it wasn’t long before she would be trapped forever. She was very decisive.”

Elizabeth arranged everything. Eric overheard her making the calls.

She told the person at the crematorium in Switzerland, “You’ll be seeing me, but I won’t be seeing you.”

They arrived in Zurich a day early and wandered the city, talking, reviewing their life together.

They ended up at an Italian restaurant where they dined on four-cheese pizza. It was the only item on the menu they could understand.

“We spoke of how fortunate we were that we had met,” says Eric, his voice softly fading. “It was in Zurich that that our bond began to break because I could not follow where she was going and her anticipation of going there was pulling her away from me . . . The bond that had so defined me was breaking.”

The couple was escorted to a small room with a bed and table.

Elizabeth suggested they begin.

A physician videotaped a brief conversation between himself and Elizabeth before he began the process.

“Mrs. MacDonald, if you drink this you will die,” he said to her on camera. “Yes. I understand,” she replied.

The ending began.

“We said our goodbyes,” says Eric. “They were constrained. She said, ‘I’m not going to cry at this. I’m not sad about this. I don’t want you to think I’m sad.’ ”

After the drugs were administered, Elizabeth was moved to the nearby bed. She asked Eric to lie with her as she faded away.

He cradled her head in his arms.

They’d chosen the Snow Patrol song “Chasing Cars” to play at this moment.

The haunting lyrics played: “If I just I just lay here/Would you lie with me/And just forget the world.”

She held his hand. They were silent. Listening.

“I could feel the life go out of her. Then I just lay there for a while. I didn’t want to let go.”

“I kissed her forehead then/and felt the cold hard flesh,/like alabaster now,/not yielding, the fire already gone;/and then, a few brief words of wrenching/agony, and farewell,/I turned and left her in the hands of strangers,/she who had been all the world to me.”

Eric explained the story.

They were kind. He was free to leave.

For the rest of the day, he wandered the streets of Zurich, following the footsteps he had walked a day before with her.

“I knew it was the answer to all she ever wanted,” he says, his eyes welling. “But I knew I would be without her from now on. I knew it was going to be difficult. It still is. That hasn’t resolved itself and I don’t think it ever will. It’s hard to believe two people could be so close.”

He ordered four-cheese pizza at the same restaurant that night.

He decided to leave Zurich as soon as he could get a flight.

As the plane was landing in Montreal, he secretly thought this would be a good time for it to crash.

Upon arrival, a customs officer asked him the purpose for his journey.

He stumbled. “I didn’t know whether to say business or personal.”

They flagged him for inspection of his baggage.

Out in the parking lot, he discovered his car had a flat tire.

There were more challenges ahead.

Elizabeth’s self-penned obituary had been spotted by a member of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, a national group with strong support from religious individuals and organizations.

Because the obituary made obvious the means of her death, the organization filed a complaint with police.

Eric agreed to be interrogated with cameras rolling. He waived his right to an attorney.

No charges were ever laid.

“We asked the police to investigate what we believed to be a legitimate question — was the law broken here?” says Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the coalition, who filed the complaint with police in Nova Scotia. “They did their due diligence and decided not to lay charges. That’s fine. But I think it’s a reasonable question to have asked.”

MacDonald still holds deep resentment toward the group.

Such resistance to assisted death is rooted, he says, in the brand of religious fervour he preached for most of his life and now dismisses with contempt.

“Religious arguments won’t do in a secular democracy. No one is bound to believe that life is a gift from God. It’s all religious tripe and nonsense.”

He has since taken scissors to his theology degrees, shredding it to pieces and throwing it away in the trash.

“I avoided the recyclables.”

Eric says he would seek to end his own life if he faced a similar intractable disease.

“I’ve watched many people die over the years as a priest. I would say only one had a peaceful death. The rest suffered pain and distress.”

Instead, the elder MacDonald remains, tending to the grave of his much younger wife.

Most days, he makes the short drive down the road to Windsor’s Maplewood Cemetery, dropping flowers and tidying up the plot.

Etched into the black granite is his name along with hers. He will one day join her here.

The inscription on the front reads, “Certainty like this comes but once in a lifetime.”

On the back, a final declaration of belief: “Pray not! The darkness will not brighten/Ask nought from the silence, for it cannot speak.”

“She defined me,” MacDonald says, standing by the gravesite as the late afternoon sun wanes into a distant haze of yellow.

“It’s hard for me now to understand the bond that held us so tightly. Had we not met, I would have held my life to have been a waste of space and time. Truly.”

“A stone, a restful grave,/where all the radiance of our bodies,/the love that burned within us,/the fire that welded us in one, is staunched in the deep earth from which we come . . . We, beneath the grass, unknowing sleep/for countless hours,/the pain all past,/at peace at last.”

— From “Flesh and Fire: A Requiem,” Eric MacDonald

Robert Cribb is a 2012 Atkinson research fellow who has spent the past four months examining how Canadians face the end of life. This story is part of a series that continues over the next two months.

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